PyCon UK 2019

Active Learning with Bayesian Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems
09-14, 13:45–14:00 (Europe/London), Marble Hall

In most of the systems, collecting data is not always free. In this poster session, I will show an approach for a matrix completion problem that learns a distribution of data where information is incomplete or collecting it has a cost.


In most of the systems, collecting data is not always free. In this poster session, I will show an approach for a matrix completion problem that learns a distribution of data where information is incomplete or collecting it has a cost. Active learning is a method of analyzing the observed data such that choosing the next observation will give the most information about the variable to be predicted. However, when observations are costly, one needs strategies to obtain informative data to arrive at accurate predictions with less data. I will show results for comparing various observation sequence selection strategies on the matrix completion problem. We used Gibbs Sampling and Variational Bayes as inference mechanisms on the MovieLens dataset. For this study, we totally use the Python programming language. I will also show our results using Python Heatmap.


Is your proposal suitable for beginners? – yes

I am Gönül, a full-time Ph.D. student in the Computer Engineering Department at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. My current research interest is Privacy in Online Social Networks.

My undergraduate degree was in Mathematics. I learned to use Python almost three years ago and now, I totally use Python programming language.

I am one of the co-organizer and mentor of Django Girls Istanbul. I am also a member of PyIstanbul for Python users in Istanbul and inzva (the sanctuary of Turkish Hackerspace community).